Corpus Search Research Articles

Pedagogical potential of Cognitive Grammar descriptions for the pluperfect in Spanish

Abstract Second/foreign language grammar studies usually focus on the validation of grammatical conceptualizations with learners, sometimes overlooking the paramount need to test these conceptualizations against users’ judgements and corpus searches as a way of verifying the relevance, frequency and suitability of the items, examples or explanations before the experimental phases. This paper deals with three pre-experimental validation criteria employed to measure the pedagogical potential of Cognitive Grammar descriptions for the Spanish pluperfect: (1) learner corpus searches based on caes – Corpus de Aprendices de Español –, (2) native-speaker corpus searches by means of EsTenTen-18-subcorpus from Sketch Engine, and (3) language users’ judgements. This tense rarely receives enough attention in learning materials due to its apparent simplicity in terms of both morphology and functional import. However, learner corpus searches show certain instability in its use. This paper explores the steps taken within the research project imagine in relation to this tense, including grammatical descriptions developed within the Cognitive Grammar framework and from a temporal-epistemic perspective in an attempt to account for the variety of uses of this tense.

How do students engage with parallel corpora in translation? A multiple case study approach

AbstractWhile emerging research has contributed significantly to our understanding of the efficacy of parallel corpora in translation education, specifically concerning student performance and perception, however, there remains a noticeable gap in the literature regarding the examination of student engagement with parallel corpora during the translation process. To address this research gap, the present study seeks to comprehensively analyse the behavioural, cognitive, and affective engagement of three MA students when utilizing parallel corpora in Chinese–English translation tasks. A multiple case study design was implemented, drawing upon a diverse range of data sources, including screencasts capturing students’ translation processes, the resultant translation outputs, corpus search logs, and in‐depth interviews. The findings of this investigation reveal distinct engagement patterns exhibited by individual students and underscore the intricate interplay of these three dimensions of engagement. Furthermore, student engagement with the parallel corpus significantly influences their translation performance. This research also unveils various factors that impact student engagement patterns, including the perceived affordances of the parallel corpus, students’ self‐perception, and learning motivation.

Natural Language Processing-based Comparative Study of Translating Characteristics from the Version of Tao Te Ching

This paper established a small-scaled corpus based on modern corpus technology, applied corpus search software Antconc3.5.8 and SPSS 16 to analyze two translating versions of Tao Te Ching from John C.H.Wu and Arthur Wayley in terms of vocabulary, syntax and context. The paper further analyzes and illustrates reasons of these two translating versions from original text understanding, translating purpose understanding and translating strategy so as to provide references with translating style study of Tao Te Ching, translators’ characteristics research and parallel corpus establishment.

Using Corpus Linguistics as a Tool in Legal Interpretation

Over the past decade, the application of corpus linguistics in legal interpretation has received attention from a group of scholars that engage in legal academics and linguistics. When the law takes into account the distribution of language usage, the application of corpus linguistics can help with addressing legal challenges. Before concluding that corpus analysis is optimally persuasive, the study addresses four difficulties that need to be addressed: The distribution of language use among a certain community must be the primary focus of the legal problem; Second, what constitutes a "ordinary" reading should be determined by the court; Thirdly, while searching a corpus to determine a term's usual meaning, one must predetermine what to look for; Fourth, there are a variety of reasons that a given meaning may turn up weak in a corpus search, and they should be recognized. Through analysis, this paper finds that though drawing on academic research and the experience of foreign judicial practice, Chinese scholars can enrich the research methods of the interdisciplinary field of law and linguistics, and provide inspiration for the nascent movement and the development of judicial practice.

‘V고 싶다’ 통사 구조 분석

This paper investigates the syntactic and semantic features of the construction ‘V -go Siphta' in Korean. The construction ‘V-go Siphta' manifested in forms such as ‘NP2 Ul/Lul V-Ko Siphta' and ‘NP2 I/Ka V-go Siphta' has been a subject of debate. To elucidate the similarities and peculiarities of these ‘V-go Siphta' constructions, an analysis was first conducted on the distinguishing features between ‘NP2 Ul/Lul' and ‘NP2 I/Ka'. Both function as essential components of a sentence, indicating the object. However, ‘NP2 I/Ka' exhibits similarities to an object complement in its difficulty to separate from the predicate. In the case of ‘NP2 I/Ka V-go Siphta', the ‘Siphta' has properties similar to an affix. Based on this analysis, corpus searches revealed that when the verb ‘V' corresponds to sensory verbs such as ‘Mekta' (to eat), ‘Pota' (to see), and ‘Tutta' (to hear), the construction ‘NP2 I/Ka V-go Siphta' is more prevalent than ‘NP2 Ul/Lul V-go Siphta'. Verbs that effectively reflect human desires and longings are more likely to be combined with ‘-go shifta' to develop into psychological adjectives. Thus, while the ‘-go-sifta' structure can function as an auxiliary verb structure, it can also function as a psychological adjective in sentences containing verbs that reflect physiological and primal desires. Therefore, in this paper, we propose two types of syntactic structures to explore further.

Towards online audiovisual translation of videos

Abstract The paper reports on the progress made by second-year language degree university students as regards their use of online corpus construction, annotation and search tools when exploring video genres (Baldry and Thibault 2010, 2020; Jablonkai and Csomay 2022). Through first-hand experiences undertaken with students using the OpenMWS platform (Taibi 2020; http://mws.pa.itd.cnr.it/ ), the paper describes the ways in which, through the creation of new interactive communities, participation in the Messina OVP (Online Video Project) has empowered these students with regard to their acquisition of textual competences and, above all, their preparation for more intensive AVT studies in their third and final year. As such, the paper is a first-step towards online audiovisual translation that lays the bases for subsequent translation work and which is thus concerned with the underlying cohesion and coherence of the overall text as well as the analysis of specific textual formations in these videos.

English and German derivation revisited

Abstract Today, a number of etymologically related native and non-native English and German suffixes derive nouns and adjectives from entire phrases, suggesting that these suffixes have evolved clitic-like properties. By providing a diachronic analysis of dictionary entries that is underpinned by corpus searches, this paper traces how this property of the schemas of German ‑ig, ‑er and ‑ismus and of English ‑y, ‑er and ‑ism has evolved in the respective languages. The present analysis reveals that some developments appear to have taken place in parallel, while others are language-specific, which offers novel insights to our understanding of diachronic change affecting morphological schemas.

Forecasting CPI with multisource data: The value of media and internet information

AbstractUsing a large Chinese news corpus and Internet search data, we conduct an in‐depth out‐of‐sample forecasting study of Consumer Price Index (CPI) with the monthly macroeconomic database. For this purpose, we combine penalized regression and mixed‐frequency data sampling (MIDAS) methods to deal with the mixed‐frequency and high‐dimensional problems. Then we measure the time‐varying contributions of data from different sources and industries via dynamic model averaging. The results show that different types of data all provide enhancement in CPI forecasting, and the inclusion of media and Internet data further improves CPI forecasts' accuracy and timeliness due to their thorough coverage and fast update. In particular, the importance of alternative data is highlighted when the economy experiencing downturn or high uncertainty.

Grammatical and Pragmatic Aspects of Slovenian Modality in Socially Unacceptable Facebook Comments

This paper investigates the grammatical and pragmatic uses of epistemic and deontic modal expressions in a corpus of Slovenian socially acceptable and unacceptable Facebook comments. We propose a set of modals that do not interpretatively vary in their modality type in order to enable robust corpus searches and reliable quantification of the results. We show that deontic, but not epistemic, modals are significantly more frequent in socially unacceptable comments, and specifically that they favour violent discourse. We complement the quantitative findings with a qualitative analysis of the discursive roles played by the modals. We explore how pragmatic communicative strategies such as hedging, boosting, and face-saving arise from the underlying syntactic and semantic properties of the modal expressions, such as the modal force and clausal syntax.

The Corpus of Historical Mapudungun: morpho-phonological parsing and the history of a Native American language

The Corpus of Historical Mapudungun (chm), which I present here, is a lemmatised, part-of-speech and grapho-phonologically parsed collection of texts in the ancestral language of the Mapuche people. This paper gives an overview of the corpus materials (spanning 1606 to 1930), their processing and search capabilities. The tei xml tags at the word and morpheme levels are shown to be suitable to account for the abundant agglutinative morphology of the language. The advantages of visualising sound–spelling equivalences across the various spelling systems in the corpus are also emphasised. Some uses and limitations of the corpus are surveyed too, with a particular emphasis on the contribution of typologically diverse languages to understanding language change and the importance of making heritage materials available to native speaker communities for revitalisation purposes.

Discovering and Mapping Colloquial Terminologies Describing Underutilized and Neglected Food Crops-A Comprehensive Review.

Global levels of biodiversity and dietary diversity are decreasing, leading to food and nutrition insecurity. This is partially due to the homogenization of the global food supply with commodity crops. The reintroduction or introduction of neglected and underutilized species, minor, forgotten, and indigenous crops and landrace varieties to the wider food systems and further diversification have been outlined as the future strategies for tackling the above by the United Nations and the Food and Agriculture Organization in their policy frameworks. Most of the above species/crops are marginalized and only used across local food systems and in research. With over 15,000 different seed banks and repositories worldwide, information transparency and communication are crucial for database searching and their effective utilization. Much confusion persists around the true nature of those plants, and this prohibits the efficient utilization of their economic potential. A linguistic corpus search and a systematic literature review were conducted using the six most popular collocates to the above terms, which were as follows: ancient, heirloom, heritage, traditional, orphan, and the more distinct term 'landrace'. The results were interpreted using the Critical Discourse Analysis method. The definitions' findings show that heirloom, heritage, and ancient are mainly used in the United Kingdom and USA, where they are used to describe 'naturalized' and 'indigenized' or 'indigenous' food crops with a strong affiliation to 'family' and the 'act of passing seeds down from generation to generation'. Orphan crops, on the other hand, are often described as being 'overlooked' by growers and 'underfunded' by researchers. Landrace is most strongly affiliated with 'locality', 'biocultural diversity', and 'indigenous', and with genomics literature, where the characteristics are often discussed in the context of genetics and population biology. Contextualizing, most of the terms were found to be 'arbitrary' and 'undefinable' due to their continuing evolution in the socially accepted form of language, perhaps apart from landrace. The review has retrieved 58 definitions for the mentioned 6 terms, together with the primary key terms creating a tool to facilitate a better inter-sector communication and aid in policy.

Trialling corpus search techniques for identifying person-first and identity-first language

This short ‘methods’ article compares results for six different corpus search techniques for identifying person-first language (e.g. person/people with obesity, person/people with mental illness) and identity-first language (e.g. obese person/people, mentally ill person/people) in a corpus. This distinction is relevant across a range of health contexts, including but not limited to obesity, diabetes, or mental illness. Consequently, there is considerable interest in corpus linguistics and beyond in identifying the frequency of such language in large corpora. However, there is no consensus regarding the specific corpus search techniques to be used for this purpose. This article therefore offers a relevant methodological contribution, based on a trial of six different search techniques. Results from each technique are compared with respect to four different parameters: raw frequency, proportional usage, number of types identified (a proxy for ‘recall’) and false positives (a proxy for ‘precision’). This comparison in turn provides a basis for recommendations for future corpus linguistic studies of person- and identity-first language. The corpus that we use for this trial is a 16.4 million word corpus with newspaper articles containing the word obesity or obese. However, the findings should be relevant to other kinds of identity where similar syntactic structures are at play for expressing identity-first and person-first language.

A Paradigm Gap in Turkish

In this paper, we argue that Turkish has a gap in the third person plural cell of the person-number agreement paradigm of desiderative constructions formed with the -AsI suffix. We provide evidence for this claim from a corpus search and an acceptability judgment experiment. The corpus search shows that the third person plural suffix is virtually unattested with -AsI desideratives and the results of the experiment show that the third person plural suffix significantly reduces the acceptability of -AsI desideratives. In order to account for the observation that third person plural desideratives are unacceptable for most speakers, we argue that both negative evidence and competition accounts contribute to the existence and persistence of the gap. We discuss that competition accounts are supported by the presence of two competing forms whereas negative evidence accounts are supported by the anomalous relative frequency distribution in the paradigm of desideratives.

Editors’ Introduction

Editors’ Introduction

Learning about Schools in the British Isles Through a Video Corpus: Reflections on an Online Project for Digital Literacy and Multimodal Corpus Construction

Through first-hand experiences undertaken with students using the OpenMWS platform (Taibi 2020), the paper reports on the progress made by second-year language degree students in English linguistics at the University of Messina as regards their use of online corpus construction, annotation and search tools when exploring video genres. The paper describes the ways in which participation in the Messina OVP (Online Video Project) on schools in the British Isles during and after the Covid crisis has proved beneficial for the students in question, both in terms of acquiring textual competences and as regards creating new interactive communities (Vasta and Baldry 2020; Baldry et al 2022).

An explanatory combinatorial dictionary of English conflict lexis: A case study of modern political discourse

Though political discourse is in the mainstream of modern studies, scholars haven’t so far paid much attention to compiling political discourse-oriented dictionaries. The need to further develop lexicographic theory and practice for specific purposes and advance new methods to dictionary making is a challenge that linguists are facing today. The aim of the case study is twofold: to work out the principles for making an Explanatory Combinatorial Dictionary (ECD) of English political conflict lexis and the microstructure of an ECD entry. The source of the data is the NOW corpus; the material is current American political discourse (2022). The ECD is generally consistent with Mel'čuk’s Meaning-Text theory (MTT). The authors describe a process of collecting and processing the data: corpus search and analysis, automatic and manual text processing, glossary compilation with the use of lexicographic, semasiological, and etymological methods and present an example of an ECD entry consisting of semantic, phonological, and cooccurrence zones. The findings prove that the use of electronic text corpora offers an effective way for compiling a specialized discourse-based dictionary. The research illustrates the validity of MTT: though based on the data of “language in context” , the dictionary is synthesis-oriented: it aims at speech production. The paper is the first result of a bigger project sketching the overall framework of the discursive ECD of political conflict lexis, which subsequent studies will hopefully develop with more precision and detail. The dictionary will be helpful for scholars in linguistics, discourse analysis, media and communication, political science, and conflict studies.

문법 형태의 다의성에 반영된 은유와 환유 - 희망표현 ‘았/었으면 좋겠다’를 중심으로-

This study found a problem arising in the use and biased meanings that is not pragmatically smooth due to the multi-sense meaning of ''-at/eot umyeon joketta'', one of the Korean expressions of hope, and determined that one of its causes is the system of textbooks and grammar books and the contents of the description without set standards. Therefore, in this study, a corpus search was performed to collect the instances where ''-at/eot umyeon joketta'' is used. A total 150 sentences were extracted through the corpus search, and all 4 meanings of ''-at/eot umyeon joketta'' were found to be used, including hope for the impossible, hope for a possibility, hope in request for action and hope for the resolution of complaint. Examining each semantic component, the hope for the impossible, hope for a possibility, hope in request for action were observed to be in metaphorical expansion relationship with one another :the hope for complaint resolution was extended from the hope for action request. It is expanded from the adjacent meanings and it was confirmed that relationship was one of metonymous expansion. This result was confirmed that the left and right(road) extensions in the male form of ''-at/eot umyeon joketta''were metaphorical and upper and lower(length) extensions were metonymous. This can be applied to instruction on the use polysemous grammar forms.

Teachers’ perceived corpus literacy and their intention to integrate corpora into classroom teaching: A survey study

AbstractGiven the importance of corpus linguistics in language learning, there have been calls for the integration of corpus training into teacher education programmes. However, the question of what knowledge and skills the training should target remains unclear. Hence, we advance our understanding of measures and outcomes of teacher corpus training by proposing and testing a five-component theoretical framework for measuring teachers’ perceived corpus literacy (CL) and its subskills: understanding, search, analysis, and the advantages and limitations of corpora. Also, we hypothesised that teacher CL is linked to their intention to use corpora in classroom teaching. Specifically, 183 teachers and student teachers received corpus training to develop their CL and then completed a survey to measure their CL and intention to use corpora in teaching in Likert-scale items together with open-ended questions. Confirmatory factor analysis indicated that a hierarchical factor structure for CL using the aforementioned five subfactors best fitted the data. Moreover, structural equation modelling indicated that CL is positively linked to the participants’ intention to integrate corpora into classroom teaching. While all five subskills are important for teachers, greater effort should be made to develop their corpus search and analysis skills, which can be viewed as the “bread and butter” of corpus training.

“Know Your Coffee!” The Cultural Semantics of a Lexico-Syntactic Molecule of English

This paper presents a cultural semantic analysis of the English syntactic construction ‘know your + noun’ made combining the analytical principles and methods of ethnosyntax (Wierzbicka, 1988, 2003, 2006a) with those of corpus-based discourse analysis (Baker, 2006; Partington et al., 2004). Three main points are made in the paper: (i) ‘know your n.’ constitutes an indissoluble lexico-syntactic molecule of English expressing its own specific meaning; (ii) this construction is both genre-specific and subject to intralinguistic variation; (iii) this construction is quintessentially Anglo, because it reflects Anglo cultural assumptions about personal autonomy informing certain speech practices in English discourse (Goddard & Wierzbicka, 2004; Wierzbicka, 2006b) and defies easy translation in other languages. The analysis is based on the findings of a corpus search in GLOWBE across varieties of English complemented by additional data from the web. The results provide a clear picture of the meaning of ‘know your n.’ and of where it situates within the broad range of know-constructions. Ultimately, the paper emphasises the contribution that corpus-based, empirical discourse analysis can make to the semantics and ethnography of syntax as well as to the study of the interface between syntax, semantics and culture.

A Plural Indefinite Article in Heritage Greek: The Role of Register

This paper investigates the use of kati “some” by Greek Heritage Speakers (HSs) in comparison to monolinguals. While all Greek determiners are marked for gender, case, and number, and agree with their nominal complement, kati is an exception, as it lacks agreement and combines only with plural nouns. Building on the existing literature, we show that its function is to remain vague about the number of individuals/entities denoted. Our hypothesis is that vague language (VL) is a feature of informal conversations and of the spoken language. To this end, we conducted a study in which Heritage Speakers of Greek and monolingual speakers of Greek participated in a production task held in two distinct settings and modalities. In addition, we performed corpus searches to see how both monolingual and Heritage Speakers use kati. The results show that monolingual speakers do indeed prefer kati in the informal register, while Heritage Speakers overgeneralize its use across registers. Our findings confirm the use of vague language in informal registers and oral modality and support claims in the literature on register levelling by Heritage Speakers. Focusing on monolinguals’ repertoire, a judgment task with different levels of formality was additionally performed. These results in principle align with our hypothesis and signal that neither frequency nor other informality contexts trigger a higher rate for kati.